Posts Tagged ‘technology’

When Elon University Professor Sirena Hargrove-Leak got her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of South Carolina in 2003, she didn’t know that she would become a sort of poster-child for women’s success in STEM careers.

Nonetheless, she did make her mark by becoming the first black-female to get an advance degree in chemical engineering from the University of South Carolina.

While this is certainly a milestone worth celebrating, the number of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, or STEM, fields is still very low.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Commerce reported the number of women in STEM careers, areas that are projected to have major growth, was only 24 percent.

But Hargrove-Leak thinks that even with that low number, there has been small progress in involving young women in STEM classes in schools.

“I remember teaching my first introduction to engineering class at Elon and I only had one female student,” she said.

Last spring, when Hargrove-Leak taught a freshman engineering class, there were eight females in the class.

“It’s interesting because here, it’s completely against the Elon ratio in the engineering classes,” Hargrove-Leak said. “Here, there are more males than females.”

But for Junior Danielle Cooke, who is majoring in biomedical engineering, the male to female ratio in the engineering school doesn’t bother her anymore.

“At first, I was super intimidated because I expected it to be all girls,” Cooke said. “But in my engineering classes, I’ve had the same group of guys for the three years, so we all know each other.”

While she is the only girl, or the minority, in most of her classes, Cooke said she’s never felt pressure to go out of her way to prove herself because she’s a girl. In fact, Cooke thinks being a woman in this field is actually advantageous.

“I think women offer a different perspective, and that makes the work environment a better place,” she said.

And senior Bio-Statistics major Kimi Peterson said that it makes sense for women to be in STEM classes because they’ve already got the skills.

“Girls are suited to work in science fields, because the field requires people who are organized and more prepared,” Peterson said. “Women usually have those traits.”

According to an article Paul Blundin from EduGuide, girl’s brains tend to be wired to do many things differently from boys when it comes to drawing conclusions, being productive, even handling boredom.

But if girls tend to have traits that would help them be successful in STEM careers, then why aren’t there more females in those fields?

And Professor of Statistics at Elon Ayesha Delpish says that that’s OK.

“I am a big proponent of women doing whatever they want to do,” Delpish said. “I think that women should do whatever they want to. What I am against is the saying that ‘Oh, you’re a girl and you can’t do that.’”

Initially, Delpish said she was not interested in math and hadn’t thought of a career in math.

“My interest growing up was English,” she said. “English anything. I never paid attention to math, until I didn’t do well on a quiz in math and my teacher said, ‘That’s OK, don’t worry. You have English.’”

It wasn’t until Delpish’s teacher brushed off her low score that she felt challenged to prove that she could be good at math.

“He said it was OK that I didn’t do well, and I wasn’t OK with that, ” she said.

While Delpish felt the push to succeed from that encounter with her teacher, for some girls, the subtle discouragement is often enough to change girls minds from pursuing STEM careers.

Hargrove-Leak thinks this is where being pro-active can be most effective.

“We have to make sure we’re getting the message out [that girls are good at math] as often and as early as possible,” she said. “Most of the work has to be done well before they get to the university.”

That’s why Hargrove-Leak said she includes a service-learning component in her class where her Elon students go to local elementary schools to perform hands-on projects with the kids.

In this setting, where kids perform small experiments and design challenges, Hargrove-Leak said that there are just as many girls in these classes as boys.

And that is true for most classrooms in the country, even well into high school.

You may be asking, “What on earth is TED?” Let’s be real, few people know what it is. (Ok…Well, at least I didn’t know what it was.)

Basically, TED, which stands for Technology Entertainment and Design, is an annual global conference that gives talks centered mostly on science and culture. Every year, speakers gather in either Palm Springs or Long Beach to present their ideas in innovative and engaging ways. In order to help speakers have their “wish” for a global change come true, the TED Prize is awarded to one speaker to put toward that wish.

Johanna Blakley

There are thousands of speakers to hear from on Ted.com (check them out!), but the speaker that I would like to highlight is Johanna Blakley. This year, Blakley spoke about the way social media is changing the perception of gender.

In her speech, Blakley explains how traditional media sources of today, such as magazines and television, target advertisements to certain audiences based on demographics, mainly gender, because they often behave with some predictability. However, according to Blakley, social media is changing the game and making it increasingly difficult to target those audiences based on gender or race or creed anymore. This is because instead of being defined by physical attributes, your online person is better defined by your interests. Advertising companies do this by monitoring your clicks (I know! Creepy, but very true.) on webpages, counting the number of times you visit a cooking or workout site. By studying your Internet habits, advertisers can make educated guesses at best about your age, gender, or race.

This brings up an interesting point for me as a communications student who hopes to become a broadcast journalist.

Most of the money used to run television production studios comes from selling ads during the commercial break. If it becomes increasingly more difficult to target ads to a certain audience during regular airing hours, how will that affect those television companies that I will one day work for? Although social media is good in a sense because it breaks down those old, tired stereotypes, if it grows into the only source of information people access, ads sales can falter and jeopardize my future career! (Yeah, that might be selfish of me to say.)

I guess, then, we must rely on the advertising companies to be inventive and hope for the best.